[HN Gopher] We Need to Die
___________________________________________________________________
We Need to Die
Author : ericzawo
Score : 73 points
Date : 2025-12-09 20:21 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (willllliam.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (willllliam.com)
| ge96 wrote:
| I'd be a von neumann probe if I could be eg. Bobiverse
| joshmarlow wrote:
| > Bryan Johnson is an interesting case here. If you take the
| longevity project to its logical end, you get someone who's
| stopped living in order to keep living - for the most part not
| eating food he enjoys, not drinking, not doing anything
| spontaneous, all in service of more years.
|
| I never understand this type of critique of Johnson. It's framed
| like he's suffering daily for his project, but the guy sounds
| happy as a clam - especially contrasted with his pre-Blueprint
| podcast with Lex Fridman.
|
| Seems like he's doing something right.
| CodingJeebus wrote:
| Perhaps he is happy. In my personal experience, people who aim
| to tackle these kinds of large problems do so out of an
| inability to let go and accept life as it is. That's not
| necessarily a bad thing, but founders tended to be some of the
| most unhappy and unsettled people I have known in my life, they
| were just really good at channeling that lack of acceptance
| into their work and lives.
|
| My hope for anyone who dedicates their lives to this kind of
| work are able to let go if they reach their deathbed without a
| solution, because if they can't, that would be a deeply painful
| way to leave this world.
| dwroberts wrote:
| > Seems like he's doing something right
|
| He's going to spend the remainder of his life obsessing over
| something he cannot control, and then he's going to die at a
| normal age (or probably earlier) any way
| sweettea wrote:
| In sum, the author proclaims that without human death, nothing
| people do has a time limit so people wouldn't have any incentive
| to do.
|
| But this is false - even if we were a sovereign observer only,
| the universe is constantly changing and evolving, species go
| extinct, the seasons are never the same. And we are not just
| observers, we are also actors - we have opportunities to create
| today which will not be available in the future. You cannot
| create the Internet today, it already happened. You cannot spend
| arbitrary time traveling to and fro across the galaxy to talk to
| friends, the molten iron geyser you wanted to see at Betelgeuse
| will no longer be running by the time you get there. Perhaps time
| motivates us, but our death is not the only thing which limits
| time.
| dvt wrote:
| I've had this (often drunken) conversation many times, I think
| mortality is fundamentally ingrained in not just the human
| condition, but the fabric of our universe. Without the finality
| of death, life seems to lose its meaning. Not only do we need to
| die, we are compelled to die, we _should_ die. This memento mori
| makes every day, ironically, worth living. One of my favorite
| verses from the Bible is Job 1:21, where he somehow reconciles
| this tragic finality with trascendent faith:
| "Naked I came from my mother's womb, and naked I will
| depart. The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away;
| may the name of the Lord be praised."
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Yes, immortality would be imprisonment. An eternity in this
| existence with no escape.
|
| It's also the ultimate equalizer. Everyone is born, everyone
| dies. There's no amount of wealth, luck, work, or misfortune
| that happens in life that changes this. We all end up as dust.
| cyberpunk wrote:
| This was the point at which he conceived his purpose, the
| thing which would drive him on, and which, as far as he could
| see, would drive him on forever. It was this. He would insult
| the Universe. That is, he would insult everybody in it.
| Individually, personally, one by one, and (this was the thing
| he really decided to grit his teeth over) in alphabetical
| order. When people protested to him, as they sometimes had
| done, that the plan was not merely misguided but actually
| impossible because of the number of people being born and
| dying all the time, he would merely fix them with a steely
| look and say, "A man can dream can't he?"
| saulpw wrote:
| And it goes beyond humans: everything that arises must cease.
|
| This is one of the three foundations of existential
| intelligence (or wisdom).
| undershirt wrote:
| > mortality is fundamentally ingrained in not just the human
| condition, but the fabric of our universe
|
| church fathers say that creation fell because of the fall of
| man
|
| > Without the finality of death, life seems to lose its
| meaning. Not only do we need to die, we are compelled to die,
| we should die
|
| deadlines help. the soul is eternal and there is a deadline for
| the body
|
| > [Job] somehow reconciles this tragic finality with
| transcendent faith
|
| he later falls into despair when things get worse, who
| wouldn't, but he is made well after he is humbled. this golden
| moment of humility forges him into a true person, winning him
| heaven not death
|
| "If you die before you die, then when you die you won't die."
| Death to the world is the last true rebellion.[1]
|
| [1]: https://deathtotheworld.com
| jonathanlydall wrote:
| The author talks about the how the certainty of death ultimately
| coming to all of us (sooner or later), gives us drive.
|
| In terms socio economic issues of immortality, the Altered Carbon
| books (or the first season on Netflix), paint a somewhat bleak
| picture how immortality makes the rich and powerful even more
| privileged. Not to say it's all bleak, but I would certainly say
| it's dystopian overall.
| fellowniusmonk wrote:
| One guy with a tendency to procrastinate extrapolates his
| expierence as a universal truth without providing any grounding.
|
| Cool man, don't try and live forever.
|
| Maybe people who haven't had their innate curiosity beaten out of
| them will get more resources to explore.
|
| I just can't help seeing the same moral panic in this as I see in
| arguments against UBI.
|
| It's like how many people with fuck you money have you met? I
| would say: "Trust me, humans do just fine without external
| deadlines or want." but it only takes like 30 seconds to find
| countless real people whose lives trivially destroy the whole
| line of argument.
|
| How about this obvious counter point, making long term, 100 year
| research investments makes way more sense to any person who has
| the chance to see them pay off.
|
| Right now this type of longterm thinking has only a few hive
| entities (RCC, governments, research labs) who can operate this
| way and we'd get a lot more exploring done if we can enable
| whatever percentage of the population was born with unbound
| curiosity to explore to their merriment.
| JellyBeanThief wrote:
| > One guy with a tendency to procrastinate extrapolates his
| expierence as a universal truth without providing any
| grounding.
|
| Other commenters here are doing that too, more or less. But
| yeah, no one's proposing _forced immortality_. We have a
| cultural habit of assuming our right to choose for everyone
| else, we see people doing it even when they 're actually
| advocating for universal rights to choose.
|
| If you're sufficiently bored at age 450 or 45, go ahead and end
| your life. Your life belongs to you, not to other people. Just
| don't harsh the mellow of the person who's happy reading books
| until age 45,000.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Bah, nah, I'll take immortality thanks. I want to see where it
| all goes.
|
| I do think there's a risk of societal stagnation if we all stick
| around forever. But, maybe we can make a deal--if we all end up
| immortal, we can make a threshold, maybe even as young as 80 or
| something, and have people retire and stop voting at that point.
| Let society stay vivacious, sure. Give us an end point for our
| toils, definitely, and a deadline for our projects.
|
| Put us in computers. We'll stick around as digital ancestor
| spirits. Just to see how it goes.
| tmsbrg wrote:
| As I said in another comment, I'm against immortality because
| old people need to make way for new generations. But this
| comment is cute. I like the idea that we'd be there and we're
| able to see how people are doing, but we're not influencing the
| world anymore. Though I could also imagine at some point it
| could become depressing in bad times when there's nothing you
| can do, or boring after tens of thousands of years of
| repetition. I can also imagine some bad spirits trying to break
| out and influence worldly affairs.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Maybe we could set it up so the "spirits" can just talk to
| the "living" when the latter start the conversation. That
| seems like a reasonable way of setting things up.
|
| It's all a bit fanciful of course--we'd basically be setting
| up an emulation of various spiritual beliefs, and there's no
| reason to believe anybody would go along with the
| constraints. But it is fun to think about.
| UtopiaPunk wrote:
| Impossible to know if there is something like Sheol after
| death, so we thought, "why not make our own eternal
| emptiness?"
| credit_guy wrote:
| > old people need to make way for new generations
|
| The main problem with extended lifespan will not be that some
| people will amass extreme wealth and power while living
| centuries, and they'll oppress the younger generations, who
| will not have a fair chance in life.
|
| The much more likely problem will be that old people will not
| adjust to the new technologies. Lots of them will be victims
| to "pig butchering" schemes. Or they'll simply be illiterate
| in the new ways of life. If medicine makes tremendous
| progress, we might end up with a good chunk of our society
| being elderly, healthy, but socially unadjusted and
| estranged. Especially with more and more people being
| childless. Imagine someone who is 110 years old, with no
| living relatives, secluded in a nursing home, not knowing how
| to use the internet, or whatever the equivalent of that will
| be at that point in time.
|
| These people deserve pity. But to they need to "make way for
| new generations"? That feels a bit eugenic to me.
| blargey wrote:
| I'm not sure why people have it in their heads that this
| "making way" requires one to be cast into the formless void
| instead of, like, a gated community.
| igor47 wrote:
| I do think we're significant more likely to solve
| immortality than the problem of getting old rich powerful
| people to relinquish their grip on wealth and power
| Arodex wrote:
| >But, maybe we can make a deal--if we all end up immortal, we
| can make a threshold, maybe even as young as 80 or something,
| and have people retire and stop voting at that point.
|
| And how is that supposed to happen once the rich and powerful
| who finance and own the rights to that immortality tech succeed
| in their research?
|
| In a world where basic health care is barely accessible in the
| US and under constant attack, how is immortality supposed to be
| given to the common men and women? Through asinine "work
| requirements", like Medicaid? Through UnitedHealthcare's
| insurance?
| weinzierl wrote:
| Me too, definitely. Should I get bored I could always go about
| and insult every being that ever lived and will live in the
| entire universe - in alphabetical order.
| sph wrote:
| I feel that those that would choose immortality are so self-
| important that they would not get any wiser from their
| additional time on earth.
| weinzierl wrote:
| Maybe you are overthinking it.
| kulahan wrote:
| Being stuck in a computer might not be so bad. "Wake up" once a
| year decade for a few hours, see what happened, go back to
| "sleep". Immortality on call.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| "I plan to live forever, of course, but barring that I'd settle
| for a couple thousand years. Even five hundred would be pretty
| nice."
| wseqyrku wrote:
| > Put us in computers.
|
| Unfortunately, that's only available for premium max customers.
| Also you should know, _plus is now standard_.
| CodingJeebus wrote:
| > Put us in computers. We'll stick around as digital ancestor
| spirits. Just to see how it goes.
|
| It's cute to think that simply creating some digital
| representation of us would be a solution to such a problem when
| one of the founders of the internet has spoken at length about
| the dangers of hardware compatibility and media obsolescence
| putting much of today's data at risk from being inaccessible
| tomorrow.[0]
|
| Nothing, and I mean nothing, is immune to the decay of time.
|
| 0: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-
| way/2015/02/13/386000092...
| bee_rider wrote:
| Well, thanks I guess. I think it _is_ a cute idea, not a
| serious one really. At least, I definitely haven't worked the
| details.
|
| We'd have to be maintained. Maybe that could be part of the
| deal. Humans are always changing anyway, so I think we'd
| couldn't be left _entirely_ at rest. Maybe we should be run
| slowly, to just to make sure things are still working. Then
| we don't have to worry about at-rest type bitrot.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| If my files could beg for their lives to be kept up-to-date
| with new storage media, I probably wouldn't have lost so many
| over time.
| serf wrote:
| whenever I imagine immortality en masse I imagine the hobbies
| that people started experimenting with after exposure to the
| concept of deathlessness in the short story 'The Metamorphosis
| of Prime Intellect'.
|
| that story is flawed for a lot of reasons, but it's interesting
| to explore what happens if death is essentially conquered.
|
| it's hard to judge whether or not society as depicted in that
| story stagnated.. but it was wholly different.
| Antibabelic wrote:
| > Put us in computers
|
| I feel like this is a modern version of believing in souls. You
| are matter, not data. If you find a way to simulate yourself on
| a computer, this will not prevent you from experiencing death.
| And if that's the case, what's the point? Stroking your ego
| with the knowledge that a simulation of you will stick around
| for some time after you give up the ghost?
| djoldman wrote:
| > And here's what I've been circling around: I think the only
| reason any of this is true is because of death. Without that
| horizon, we could defer everything indefinitely. Why start the
| difficult journey today when you have infinite tomorrows? Just as
| you "remember your death" to really live life, perhaps we need
| the deadline to do the work at all. Death is what pulls us out of
| pure consumption and into pursuit. You could call it "just a
| deadline", but I disagree. It's what makes us begin.
|
| I'm not sure it's transparently bad that we could defer
| everything indefinitely. Why would that matter? Also, it's not
| certain that we would. Perhaps we would get very bored and then
| be spurred to action.
| Arodex wrote:
| Immortality is absolutely not compatible with our current
| capitalistic social system. Whenever you see startups and rich
| guys financing research in that domain, there is never any talk
| about giving it away to hoi polloi like you and me. Death is the
| last economic redistribution system still standing - and when you
| see they are doing everything they can to nullify any inheritance
| tax, you can imagine they don't intend to give away anything -
| fortune, position, power - once they become immortal.
|
| And imagine the North Korean or Russian dictators (or American
| "President") having access to the technology.
| Palomides wrote:
| it's kinda weird that you think modern capitalism/mode of
| wealth is a harder problem to solve than literal immortality
|
| I'll take eternal life even if Putin gets it, thanks
| Arodex wrote:
| "Imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever"
| euroderf wrote:
| Inheritance of precarity.
| euroderf wrote:
| Agreed. Lack of turnover of property (in all forms) is a
| danger. Monotonically increasing wealth concentration.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| There have been many, many stories over the millenia that try to
| empart the wisdom that mortality is necessary. Some present it as
| being a gift.
|
| I don't think any one source made it _click_ for me, but I think
| some combination of watching _The Good Place_ , _Sandman_ , and a
| lot of _Black Mirror_ got me really stretching my imagination of
| what it would feel like to be truly immortal. I had a moment that
| felt like my horizons had been expanded very slightly when I felt
| this severe _dread_ for maybe half a second. A feeling of being
| inescapably trapped.
|
| There's also this PC game called _The Coin Game_ that 's just a
| solo-dev making lots of arcade games. They exist on an island
| where you have a home and some hobbies and a few arcades and I
| think even a mall. But the entire island is devoid of humanity.
| There's just a bunch of robots. I don't know if the game has a
| backstory, but the one my brain filled in is that this is a sort
| of playground for you to live in forever... and it's got a San
| Junipero feel, but far more bleak. Gave me the chills. I'm happy
| to be mortal.
| munificent wrote:
| _> I had a moment that felt like my horizons had been expanded
| very slightly when I felt this severe dread for maybe half a
| second. A feeling of being inescapably trapped._
|
| Guillermo del Toro's "Frankenstein" explores this feeling.
| kulahan wrote:
| What a visual masterpiece that movie was. I love Guillermo so
| much.
| jacksontheel wrote:
| Guillermo del Toro's "Pinnochio" actually impressed the dread
| feeling much more, personally. It's interesting how similar
| these two movies are, considering the target audience is
| quite different.
| kulahan wrote:
| I'm with you. The idea of being immortal is terrifying to me.
| Will I still care about nature after seeing millions of
| extinctions? Will I still care about life when I see trillions
| of humans doing human things? Will I even still feel part of
| the universe as the only permanently unchanging thing?
|
| Hard pass. Besides, if we were immortal, we wouldn't have my
| favorite quote, which feels a bit relevant here. As the great
| mind of our time, Bill Watterson says: "There's never enough
| time to do all the nothing you want."
| ed_mercer wrote:
| >Will I still care about nature
|
| A society that has the ability to provide infinite life, will
| for sure have the ability to inject this caring feeling back.
| wat10000 wrote:
| It seems absurd to argue that death is necessary or good when
| there is exactly _zero_ experience with the alternative.
|
| Imagine a society where everyone has a ball and chain
| permanently attached from birth. It would be just a part of
| life. Some thinkers might write articles about how much better
| things would be if a way could be found to get rid of the ball
| and chain. Others would come up with arguments for why the ball
| and chain is actually good, or even necessary. The limitation
| on movement gives life a purpose. The resistance helps build
| strength.
|
| Looking at such a society from the outside, we'd find the
| latter arguments ludicrous. How can it possibly be _better_ to
| stuck with a major physical restriction your entire life? If
| anyone said we should start doing this to all our children,
| they 'd be run out of town.
|
| If humanity does solve the problem of death, I doubt it will be
| absolute, in any case. Aging might be stopped, maybe added
| resistance to disease and injury, but nothing is going to allow
| you to survive hugging a detonating nuclear bomb, or any number
| of other physically extreme events. If you decide forever is
| not for you, then you'd be able to make that choice.
| WA9ACE wrote:
| Unless such anti-aging style immortality solution was widely
| available, you would much more likely end up with a situation
| similar to In Time (2011). The poor fighting for continued
| survival, while the wealthy live forever.
| RagnarD wrote:
| Argues for becoming wealthy.
| teeray wrote:
| > watching _The Good Place_ ... I had a moment that felt like
| my horizons had been expanded very slightly when I felt this
| severe dread for maybe half a second. A feeling of being
| inescapably trapped.
|
| Ah, he saw the time-knife
| joegibbs wrote:
| Most of those stories are just sour grapes. Dying has been the
| biggest fear for all of history for most people, and especially
| back then people were losing their family and friends at young
| ages.
|
| You have to have some kind of belief in that situation that
| dying has a special purpose, or something happens after you die
| so that you're rewarded.
|
| It's the same as the suffering of a medieval peasant, which
| they thought was so important. Nowadays we have eliminated
| that. Was it really giving them such an important meaning and
| rich life? No, they just thought it did to cope.
|
| Besides, even if we cured aging it wouldn't mean we're trapped
| living forever, you'd be guaranteed to get killed some other
| way anyway.
| mattbettinson wrote:
| Nah I'm good. I'll just hang out with my friends and play video
| games every day
| Legend2440 wrote:
| >You can see this in retirement, actually. There's real data
| showing mortality spikes in the years after people stop working.
| The structure of striving, even when it felt like a burden, was
| providing something that leisure alone can't replace. People who
| stop pursuing things often just... decline.
|
| Or maybe people stop working because their health was declining?
| IAmBroom wrote:
| The counterpoint is in all the people who pursue daily goals
| intensely, at high ages. POTUSes and SCOTUSes, by example, tend
| to outlive most USians, and tend to stay active with projects
| or jobs long beyond normal retirement.
| tmsbrg wrote:
| Not the argument I expected. I'm also against people living
| forever, but more because it's a way for society to go forward
| and get rid of old ways of thinking. There's a saying that
| science advances one death at a time. And can you imagine a world
| where current leaders are still in power 1000 years later? Or
| where the leaders of 1000 years ago were still in charge?
| Whenever I hear people talk about living forever I think of how
| it'd be something tech billionaires and autocrats would use to
| oppress us forever. No thanks.
| orangecat wrote:
| _I 'm also against people living forever, but more because it's
| a way for society to go forward and get rid of old ways of
| thinking._
|
| Well, I'd like to get rid of the old way of thinking that death
| is good :p
|
| _And can you imagine a world where current leaders are still
| in power 1000 years later?_
|
| Leaders generally don't rule for life in functioning countries,
| and the mortality of individual Kims has not helped the people
| of North Korea.
|
| _I think of how it 'd be something tech billionaires and
| autocrats would use to oppress us forever._
|
| How are these people currently oppressing you, and how would
| the existence of longevity treatments make that worse?
| tmsbrg wrote:
| > Leaders generally don't rule for life in functioning
| countries, and the mortality of individual Kims has not
| helped the people of North Korea.
|
| I guess you'd say most people in the world don't live in
| functioning countries then? China, Russia, much of the middle
| east and Africa are not democratic and sometimes the death of
| a dictator is the only way to move them forward. USA and many
| democracies in the west are also backsliding so maybe soon
| few people will live in a "functioning country".
|
| Counterpoint on Kim: The death of Stalin or Mao Zedong
| released a death grip on their respective countries. You
| can't ignore that getting rid of natural death would make
| individual centralization of power a worse problem.
|
| >How are these people currently oppressing you, and how would
| the existence of longevity treatments make that worse?
|
| Just one example: Trump using sanctions to block the ICC from
| doing it's job (and thus letting people in Gaza die and
| blocking steps of justice against Israel). The fact is that
| the centralization of power in modern times into individual
| hands is already unprecedented. Old people are already ruling
| the world and they'd do everything to rule it forever.
| photonic34 wrote:
| Two major counterpoints, the second borrowed from de Grey.
|
| 1. I am young enough that a sense of mortality is not a true
| motivation to start things now. While I know about my mortality,
| I do not, in the visceral sense, believe it. My motivation to
| start things now instead of later is to experience the rewards
| sooner, not a foreboding panic of losing finite time. I suspect
| this is true for at least very many people.
|
| 2. The argument doesn't survive a simple inversion test. Let's
| concede every single disadvantage immortality might bring-- lack
| of motivation, innovation, housing. Suppose we already live in
| that world. Would a reasonable solution be to introduce a
| massive, rolling holocaust (i.e. introduce into this world the
| concept of death)?
| orangecat wrote:
| _Would a reasonable solution be to introduce a massive, rolling
| holocaust (i.e. introduce into this world the concept of
| death)?_
|
| And not only death, but aging. Even if that society decided
| (wrongly IMO) that nobody should live longer than 100 years, it
| would be insane to enforce that by making everyone's bodies and
| minds deteriorate over several decades.
| lerp-io wrote:
| when you put "we" in title it makes it sound like you think other
| people should die not just yourself.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| Yes...?
| wouldbecouldbe wrote:
| I don't think there are is an issue with finding ways to extend
| life. But there is an issue with people clinging to life out of
| attachment; part of getting older is accepting change & the flow
| of things.
| waldrews wrote:
| You might start questioning meaning of life with a billion year
| time budget. A million years seems reasonable to cover the range
| of things you could anticipate wanting to learn or experience. A
| few thousand years, no, that's not enough, you have to start
| cutting corners, you can barely even visit nearby worlds and only
| cover a few intellectual disciplines.
| netfortius wrote:
| To me the "revelation" came via Emil Cioran's book "The
| inconvenience of being born" (the actual book's title in English
| is "The Trouble with Being Born", but I like better the term
| that's closer to the French original). Excellent justification.
| smrtinsert wrote:
| I don't see how any sort of immortality can be supported by the
| infrastructure of the world. It's based on people dying,
| civilization has factored it in. How could you manage resources
| for populations that never disappeared? No immortal organism
| exists, I'm pretty sure Darwin already solved this question for
| us.
| gmuslera wrote:
| The punishment for crimes in Altered Carbon was sending you to a
| far enough future so you know nothing and no one. With age you
| get alienated in a similar way, maybe adding (lack of)
| understanding on the mix. Your brain have limits, your
| adaptability have limits, your physiology have limits, pushing
| them forward doesn't take them out. Eventually you get tired,
| bored, or want to get out. At least speaking about most and not
| special cases (I hope).
|
| And having a simulation of ourselves in a different media is a
| different game.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > Death doesn't need to come at any particular time, but it does
| need to exist, looming just around the corner.
|
| It always would: fatal accidents would still be a thing. So
| would:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Islamist_terrorist_att...
|
| Then there'd always be the risk of a gigantic asteroid hitting
| the earth.
|
| Stuff like that.
|
| Which makes me wonder: if there was no more aging and no more
| illness and accidents and terror attacks / crimes were basically
| the only way to die, how would society deal with those?
|
| I take we'd focus on preventing accidents / safety even more? For
| at the moment there's definitely some _" we're not going to live
| forever anyway, so it's just bad luck if an accident happens"_.
|
| And what about suicide? Taking your life when you're going to die
| anyway is one thing, taking it out when you're near immortal is
| something else altogether.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Let's say you can rebuild telomeres while curing cancer and
| keeping arterial walls healthy, and even prevent the _physical_
| aspects of dementia or Alzheimer 's. Who's to say that an
| immortal human can retain consciousness, let alone sanity? What
| would be the psychology of an ancient being? What happens to its
| memories, how could it recall anything from centuries past? And,
| as sometimes explored horror and science fiction, how would such
| a creature retain its humanity rather than becoming a hedonistic,
| nihilistic misanthrope that considers itself beyond petty
| morality?
| jstummbillig wrote:
| Interesting, but I disagree with the main premise. I am currently
| not motivated not because of my coming death but because I am
| frustrated when things are bad. More time would give me more time
| to be frustrated. I simply don't think that things will be great
| or boring just because a lot of time passes. Things change at a
| speed that adaption alone can occupy any one of us forever.
| mrg3_2013 wrote:
| This resonates with me. Too much of anything loses value. This
| includes life. If there's no death, it would take special
| individuals to make sense out of it.
| WA9ACE wrote:
| "The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they
| took from the people will return to the people. And so long as
| men die, liberty will never perish."
|
| -- The Great Dictator by Charlie Chaplin
| CodingJeebus wrote:
| ...unless the dictator has kids, which happens all the time
| throughout history
| munificent wrote:
| Derren Brown's book "Happy: Why More or Less Everything Is Fine"
| (which is much better than the title might lead you to believe)
| does a very good job exploring the philosophy behind this.
|
| The choices we make have meaningful and value in large part
| because we sacrifice a fraction of our finite time and attention
| in order to do them. But once you have infinite time, then the
| value of everything you do becomes zero.
| Palomides wrote:
| by that logic things done during shorter lives are more
| valuable, so you should kill everyone as soon as possible to
| make their lives more meaningful
|
| lotta people in this thread with anti-life beliefs
| tern wrote:
| For me, the biggest tell was how frequently older people report
| feeling completely at peace and ready to die.
|
| As my own life progressed, the feeling of novelty became harder
| to find, and then less important. Grief became easier, death
| became lighter.
|
| As I deepened my investigation into the nature of my own
| experience, I started to realize that "I" do not exist in the way
| that I originally assumed, and I started to wonder what we're
| even talking about when we talk about death. Who or what is
| dying?
|
| The self, time, and consciousness are not well-understood in
| philosophy, science, or the experience of most people, and as
| such, most conversations about immortality are really about
| something else.
| Palomides wrote:
| that seems like a circular justification
|
| if my body and mind were falling apart and all my
| friends/family went before me maybe I'd be ready... but I see
| that as a huge argument in favor of immortality since I want
| people I care about to be alive and healthy
| tern wrote:
| justification for/of what?
| XorNot wrote:
| > For me, the biggest tell was how frequently older people
| report feeling completely at peace and ready to die.
|
| That's because it's inevitable and at that point they've been
| sick or infirm for years to decades.
|
| No one has run the real experiment because they can't: put that
| person in the body of a healthy 20 year old and see if they
| still feel that way. Except we already kind of know the answer
| because we regard being suicidal in your 20s as mental illness.
| tern wrote:
| > That's because it's inevitable and at that point they've
| been sick or infirm for years to decades.
|
| Maybe, maybe not. Either way, the experiment would be
| interesting indeed.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| > As my own life progressed, the feeling of novelty became
| harder to find, and then less important. Grief became easier,
| death became lighter.
|
| This has been my experience as well. When I was 20, I couldn't
| understand why someone would be ready to die outside of extreme
| illness or depression. Now, at 40, I am beginning to
| understand. I'm not ready to die yet, but I can envision myself
| being there someday. This world is _tiring_ and I can
| understand how a person would reach the point where they
| welcome an end to their story.
| moralestapia wrote:
| >There's this genuine repulsion I feel when people talk about a
| future where death by old age is no longer a thing.
|
| Tell me you're from the US without telling you're from the US.
| They're always keen to police over other people's lives, it's so
| noticeable when you're not from that culture.
|
| As with almost every other "controversial" topic, the answer to
| this one is: let people who want to die, die, and let people who
| want to live, live.
| drhagen wrote:
| A funny thing I realized: immortality is incompatible with
| spending a nonzero fraction of my life with children.
|
| I treasure the time I spend with my kids. I can see that this
| season will be over soon. This won't be my whole life, but it
| will be a significant fraction of my life. If I were immortal,
| this would be a tiny blip in the inconceivably far past for 100%
| of my life.
|
| You may think I could start again every 100 or 1000 or million
| years, but if a nonzero fraction of people did that, that would
| be exponential growth. Even ignoring resource constraints, you
| cannot sustain exponential growth of any kind in a 3D universe.
|
| A universe with kids necessitates a universe with death.
| card_zero wrote:
| Yes, but why do people treasure time spent with their kids _so
| much,_ expressing the feeling in revelatory terms - why this
| addiction to reproduction, the thing that perpetuates the genes
| that might cause the feeling? It 's suspicious.
| tolerance wrote:
| I want to see more writing like this in Century 21.5
| zebomon wrote:
| The author's argument seems to be a practical one and two-part:
| 1) without death, there's nothing to motivate us to live life
| well and 2) unless we live life well, there's no point in living.
|
| I just disagree with both postulates, and that's fine. The author
| can go on thinking that life needs to be something specific in
| order for it to be desirable. I myself like being productive. I
| also like eating fast food every once in a while. I think I'd be
| able to go on living (with some happiness to boot) if I never had
| another productive day or another McD's burger ever again.
|
| Life can be its own end. If we manage to end death by aging,
| someday there will be children who have never known another
| world, and they'll marvel at all the death-centric thinking that
| permeated the societies of their past.
| roxolotl wrote:
| I think the point is a bit more nuanced and has to do with the
| authors conception of the self. He argues that even if you got
| immortality and lived a great life at some point You would stop
| being You so you might as well have died anyways. I think it's
| a bit silly. But if you believe that enough alteration of the
| self results in its death, a sort of Self of Theseus, then I
| think it's a consistent opinion.
|
| > His argument is precise: the desires that give you reason to
| keep living (he calls them categorical desires) would either
| eventually exhaust themselves, leaving you in a state of
| "boredom, indifference and coldness", or they'd evolve so
| completely that you'd become a different person anyway. Either
| way, the You that wanted immortality doesn't get it. You just
| die from a lack of Self rather than through physical mortality.
| jmward01 wrote:
| We need to force change to encourage growth and exploration.
| "Science advances one funeral at a time" acknowledge this but
| that doesn't mean actual death is needed. We need to create
| strong systems that encourage forcing people, and processes, out
| in everything we do. Term limits, retirement, etc etc. Nothing
| should have a 'forever' clause to it because nothing is forever.
| GMoromisato wrote:
| This is like worrying about the sun going supernova after you've
| just discovered fire. Yes, eventually Earth will be reduced to a
| blackened cinder. And yes, if humans managed to live forever,
| there would be unforeseen (maybe bad) consequences.
|
| If I get to live to 200, I still won't worry about it. If I get
| to live to 1,000, maybe I might start to think about it.
| Fortunately, by then, I will have had 1,000 years of experience
| to maybe come up with better answers than now.
|
| Can you imagine the hubris of telling someone who has lived for
| 10,000 years that death is good because you can't think of what
| you'd do with that time?
|
| Moreover no one is talking about making it impossible to die. No
| one is going to force you to live forever.
|
| And that's the real problem for the nay-sayers. They know that
| they don't have to live forever if they don't want to. They just
| don't want _other people_ to live forever. They want to live in a
| world where other people die.
| wat10000 wrote:
| I'm in favor of improving longevity, but sometimes there is
| something to be said for other people dying. Imagine a world
| where Stalin was still alive and would remain so approximately
| forever.
|
| I don't think this is a reason to avoid research on aging, but
| immortal dictators could certainly be a downside.
| mrg3_2013 wrote:
| Had a chuckle at the mention of Stalin. Made me think. I
| would also think, the evils would be the one who would badly
| want to live forever, if an option was presented.
| GMoromisato wrote:
| Queue the hot-mic moment between Putin and Xi where they
| discussed living longer with modern medical miracles.
| mrg3_2013 wrote:
| That makes total sense now, indeed!
| polivier wrote:
| > And that's the real problem for the nay-sayers. They know
| that they don't have to live forever if they don't want to.
| They just don't want _other people_ to live forever. They want
| to live in a world where other people die.
|
| If one can make a good argument that people living forever
| would have too many downsides in the long run, one might
| reasonably not want others to live forever. This is similar to
| environmental policies. Even though one may not live through
| most downsides of current bad environmental policies, one may
| still want good environmental policies for the sake of their
| children.
| GMoromisato wrote:
| Sure, I agree with that. But at that point it becomes a
| philosophical/ethical argument: should we allow certain
| people to die (or even kill them) to benefit others?
|
| There was a time (not even that long ago) when 50% of kids
| died before the age of 5. I can totally imagine people saying
| back then that this was the "natural order of things" and
| that allowing every kid to live would be disastrous to the
| environment.
|
| My philosophy is that we should allow (and even enable)
| people to live as long as they want. I wish that were not
| controversial, but here we are.
| igor47 wrote:
| > when 50% of kids died before the age of 5. I can totally
| imagine people saying back then that this was the "natural
| order of things"
|
| One could imagine this, but it wasn't a serious position
| that anyone actually held. I think discomfort with
| immortality, especially on consequentialist grounds, is a
| more legitimate concern
| murat124 wrote:
| Everything that has a beginning has an end. It would be really
| cool to live until whenever and realize that given our poor
| capacity to recollect past events we humans are actually the
| goldfish of the universe. No death means you only remember hash
| of events that are so distant in your past which is basically how
| you felt. After some time of life you start to only remember your
| feelings without recollecting much details about the events.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| I think this is almost completely post-hoc rationalization.
|
| It's a lot easier to accept death if you believe it's a natural,
| necessary, good thing. And since we're all going to die, this
| post-hoc rationalization makes us feel better.
| moribvndvs wrote:
| Living long enough to see everything else die while pseudo-
| immortals try to fight entropy-particularly with the much worse
| coming consequences of human civilization borrowing heavily
| against the ecosystem- is a hell I don't think I would want to
| see. Like the author, I'm not opposed to extending a bit, but...
| I suppose that's a slippery slope. Today "just a little longer"
| seems reasonable, and then it will be just a little bit longer,
| and then a little bit longer after that. I suppose at some point
| after that you risk becoming little more than your dwindling ego,
| something of a lich lord or revenant jealously draining the world
| of life because you're too afraid to admit: you don't matter (no
| one does in the grand scheme of things) and the universe wasn't
| designed for immortality or to appease your ego. In the more
| practical and nearer term, I fear life extension will be more a
| matter of trading quality of life simply to avoid dying, a form
| of life support. Doesn't sound good to me.
| slibhb wrote:
| Why the focus on immortality? I don't want to be immortal but I'd
| take a few thousand years.
|
| That aside, I think longevity-skepticism is still mostly
| adaptive. I haven't seen any concrete progress and the people who
| are true believers are a. getting their hopes up and b. tend to
| be really gullible/easy to manipulate. We should ideally be
| skeptical enough to avoid those traps but hopeful enough to
| pursue genuinely promising research.
| username135 wrote:
| I try to live life by the following lyric:
|
| All you touch and all you see is all your life will ever be.
|
| Endeavor to touch and see everything. Therein, you'll discover
| quite a lot about you and all else.
| netfortius wrote:
| The part about retirement is total BS. I worked hard to FIRE in
| my mid 50s as I had already over 300 books still to read by then,
| min 20 countries I still wanted to visit, two additional
| languages to learn enough to be able to read in original some of
| the books not having been translated in the languages I already
| know, and update my physics and math college knowledge from when
| I was younger. None of this was possible while working. And quite
| a few years later I now have over 500 books left (the original
| ones had tons of references which expanded a lot of books to a
| few more), still places to see, even in countries which I crossed
| out from the original list, but I could not completely traverse,
| or languages not yet mastered to the level I need.
| nice_byte wrote:
| I've had this experience a couple years ago where I had to go
| under for a sudden/unplanned surgery. It felt like I should be
| worried, but I realized that I was 100% ok with not waking up
| from that.
|
| We already live so much further past what our lifespan "in the
| wild" would be. Even ~75yrs is already excruciatingly long. I
| don't understand people who want to prolong it even further.
| delichon wrote:
| Widespread failure to die would cement culture in place, and the
| power structure. It necessarily would dramatically slow down
| cultural evolution, which strongly depends on funerals. Logan's
| Run had the right idea, just the wrong number. We old geezers
| must make way for civilization to effectively adapt to a changing
| environment.
|
| Even if our lifespans become merely 200 years, imagine if the
| generation of the US Civil War era were still in power. Great age
| plus health equals social petrification.
| alembic_fumes wrote:
| This comment section is for some reason filled with truly
| incredulous takes, with many seemingly all too willingly
| embracing the inevitability of personal oblivion awaiting us at
| the end of our lives. I wonder what solace it brings to entertain
| the paradox of dying as a way to bring life meaning, and where it
| ranks between whatever the local pastor or suburb's heroin dealer
| are peddling.
|
| I suspect our education system is at fault. Too many children in
| the modern western society grow up completely isolated from
| philosophical thinking and the teachings of both ancient as
| contemporary philosophers. As a consequence they never get
| exposure to the various deep, tragic, hilarious, and most-of-all
| diverse ways that we as humans have tried to build meaning into
| our fleeting lives, triumphant or struggling.
|
| To me, this quote from the article best showcases the status quo:
|
| > And here's what I've been circling around: I think the only
| reason any of this is true is because of death. Without that
| horizon, we could defer everything indefinitely.
|
| If you agree with that, I cannot stop you. But maybe I can shake
| you just a little with a different, more individualistic
| viewpoint:
|
| Whatever life you have, in whatever circumstances, is the one and
| only life that you do have. The way it has been is the only way
| that it can ever be, but the future is whatever you make of it,
| and it cannot be anything else.
|
| Whatever you experience in life, is all that there is to
| experience. If you yourself don't climb a mountain, you will
| never know what climbing that mountain is like. And if you hear a
| tree fall in a forest but then forget about it, it no longer has
| made a sound.
|
| Nobody else can do this experiencing for you: much like you
| didn't directly experience your parents' lives, your children
| won't directly experience yours. But as long as you yourself are
| alive, you get to experience your parents and children through
| the only single way that you can: through yourself.
|
| And so to accept death for yourself is to accept the end of all
| experience that has ever been. It is to accept death not only
| yourself, but also for your parents, children, all the climbed
| mountains and sounds of fallen trees, and all life and the
| universe itself. For once the one singular entity in the entire
| universe that has been capable of experiencing is gone, it's as
| if nothing had ever existed.
|
| So try to stick around and keep experiencing? There really isn't,
| and hasn't ever been, anything else.
|
| Post-mortem survivalists may disagree.
| trimethylpurine wrote:
| If it wasn't necessary it wouldn't have been selected for, having
| nothing to do with the philosophical or spiritual significance.
| Those species that didn't age became extinct because their
| genetic pools were too slow and stagnant to adapt to
| environmental circumstances or non-adaptive altogether. Both of
| which are terminal at the species level. Evolution doesn't favor
| the survival of the fittest individual. It favors the
| continuation of life, generally.
|
| That's been my concern; that solving mortality for individuals
| might be a death sentence for the species.
| skissane wrote:
| Life extension research isn't going to make anyone immortal - it
| can't prevent deaths from accidents or foul play, and after a few
| thousand years the odds you will succumb to one or the other
| becomes quite high. Suicide is likely to be another major factor,
| including active suicide (possibly styled as euthanasia), the
| passive suicide of choosing to stop all this life extension
| wizardry, and intentional recklessness soon resulting in
| accidental death. Finally, for all we know there is a long tail
| of obscure disease processes that only kick in after lifespans no
| one has as yet ever reached-and even though that too might
| eventually be solved, if it takes you a thousand years to find
| the first case of such a disease, how many will die from it
| before you find a cure?
| igor47 wrote:
| Maybe. There's plenty of science fiction that addresses this.
| For example the "meths" (short for Methuselah) in altered
| carbon, who achieve immortality by making backups of their
| brains that can be spawned to cloned bodies. You could recover
| from accidents, or roll back to before the obscure disease
| kicked in
| mrandish wrote:
| > it can't prevent deaths from accidents or foul play
|
| Cory Doctorow's wonderful sci-fi book "Down and Out in the
| Magic Kingdom" explored exactly this in interesting ways. In
| the book people in the future can live essentially forever by
| transferring their consciousness into new bodies. They can also
| back up the contents of their consciousness, something most
| people do nightly but certainly before doing some dangerous
| extreme sport. Doing dangerous things without backing yourself
| up is considered tantamount to suicide since you lose all the
| memories and personal growth, essentially the person you became
| since your last backup.
|
| People do get bored and will sometimes choose to "deadhead" for
| hundreds of years at a time, which is putting yourself into
| stasis and skipping those centuries. The book is full of
| provocative ideas about how practical immortality might
| actually work on a personal and societal level.
| leethargo wrote:
| And we know how reliable normies are with the backup of their
| personal data...
| roenxi wrote:
| To even consider "immortal" as possible suggests someone hasn't
| had a lot of formal math training. Infinity is rather large. In
| an infinite amount of time, any possible conjunction of
| circumstances that could cause an immortality system to fail
| will happen. Talking in thousands, millions or even billions of
| years doesn't even need to be rounded to be basically zero when
| compared to eternity.
|
| Death is a certainty. No amount of technology can change that
| even theoretically. We don't even have reason to be confident
| that the universe itself is eternal, let alone any component of
| it.
| jmogly wrote:
| Eh I'll take my 78, someone else can have the rest.
| summermusic wrote:
| If you have an evening to burn, 17776 by Jon Bois[0] is a
| surprisingly captivating multimedia story/project about this
| topic. It speculates about a future Earth where people have been
| immortal for thousands of years and explores what happens through
| the lens of absurd football games. Previously discussed on HN in
| 2017[1].
|
| [0] https://www.sbnation.com/a/17776-football
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14714607
| npodbielski wrote:
| > they'd evolve so completely that you'd become a different
| person anyway.
|
| How is that a bad thing? Are you the same person you were when
| you were 15? Of course not. Is it the case for when you were 20
| or 30? No. The whole point of living is to learn, gather new
| experiences and grow. Would you stop doing that because you are
| immortal? No.
|
| I think author is caught too much in his work whatever it is. Me,
| personnally would love to meet my grandkids and their kids. Learn
| and try do new things for dozens of years.
|
| Would this be bad to see the wolrd or even other worlds if we
| could be able to visit other planets?
|
| I think the main problem is that people are getting old and
| unhealthy. My grandpa was living for 92 years and I saw that he
| is miserable. He was fine mentally but his body was failing him.
| Imagine getting up in the morning and everything hurts. You try
| to go to the bathroom but your hand are shaking. That is the
| problem.
|
| At some point you just do not want to live anymore. Because it is
| just suffering.
| Paratoner wrote:
| > for dozens of years
|
| Yeah, that's not eternity. And if you read the article at all
| you'd know the argument is not against life extension, it's
| about having constraints, horizons, and deadlines to give
| meaning and urgency to things.
| lencastre wrote:
| the 1973 essay can't be found on that link, maybe provide an
| alternative :-/
|
| _nobody_ needs to die, even assuming quality of living is
| maintained with age, and that one can live 1000s of years, that
| decision belongs to the self /jk
|
| srsly, how is this an issue if everything in the Universe
| eventually dies, why wouldn't we?
| mock-possum wrote:
| What do you mean 'we'
|
| I don't identify with _anything_ written here.
|
| > Without that horizon, we could defer everything indefinitely.
| Why start the difficult journey today when you have infinite
| tomorrows?
|
| _because I want to_. Don't you have things you want to do? Don't
| you have desires? I don't want to do it tomorrow, I want to do it
| _now_.
|
| > When everything is possible, and nothing is urgent, with no
| real consequences for time misspent, what do you even care about?
|
| Same thing I care about now - seeking pleasure. There are so many
| positive, enjoyable, pleasant, pleasureable, exciting, thrilling,
| gratifying, enlightening, edifying, joyful, enriching, uplifting
| experiences - I could spend a lifetime pursuing them and never
| even come close to enjoying them all. Even if I had a thousand
| lifetimes, by the time I finally finished off the list I started
| with, there would be exponentially more that had been added since
| I started.
|
| In all honesty, reading this, I think something is wrong with the
| author. He does not love life the way he ought to, and that's a
| shame, and I resent that he'd project that weakness, as if it's
| somehow insightful or laudable or applicable to me.
| blargey wrote:
| The headline argument hinges on the size of infinities to assert
| that you'll run out of goals to live for eventually, and thus
| will eventually become vacuous and despondent over an infinite
| timeline. But this reliance on infinities is also why they cannot
| propose a concrete age limit for the Logan's Run Law their gut so
| desires. May that remain the case for infinity.
|
| Some counter-shower-thoughts:
|
| Are children's lives vacuous and despondent? They have no sense
| of mortality, no sense of limits, no comprehension even of the
| fleeting nature of their childhood, and honestly they aren't
| really striving for a goal the way an Everest climber, or even
| the average salaried worker, is. Maybe there's more to the
| meaning of life than striving towards a lofty-yet-grounded-and-
| pinpoint goal?
|
| Are dogs and cats given longer legal lifespans than humans
| because they seem happy enough without this vaunted sense of
| mortality and strife?
|
| Why are Everest summiters or retirees left without goals to
| strive for, when they've only achieved one or less? That's
| tangential to Williams' proposition! Is it not because they have
| too little time left before their "dead"line to forge and pursue
| a new one, particularly given the toll of aging on mind and body?
| That seems like the opposite of the point the author's trying to
| prove.
| anonnon wrote:
| Reminds me of the "fat acceptance" and "healthy at any size"
| nonsense that went right out the window as soon as Ozempic became
| widely available. You can bet these people will, hypocritically,
| show no less eagerness than anyone else to use the first
| treatments to slow or reverse aging when they arrive.
|
| And notice, these aging apologia are always written from the
| perspective of someone who hasn't had to actually deal first-hand
| with the worst consequences aging has to offer. It's never a
| chronically sleep-deprived caregiver tending to a parent with a
| neurodegenerative disease who needs assistance with basic tasks
| like getting out of bed, going to the bathroom, bathing, and
| dressing themselves. This guy, from his bio, did a few startups,
| and now does market research, and impudently thinks he has
| "wisdom" or "life lessons" to give.
|
| > And here's what I've been circling around: I think the only
| reason any of this is true is because of death. Without that
| horizon, we could defer everything indefinitely. Why start the
| difficult journey today when you have infinite tomorrows?
|
| Caregivers _have already deferred everything indefinitely,
| because they have no choice_. And the "deadlines" of aging he
| celebrates are easily just as _demotivating_ ; e.g., after a
| certain point, why bother going back to college for that PhD, or
| learning Mandarin? You'll be too old by the time you're done.
| Lorin wrote:
| Anyone else see the irony of someone named Grey being pro
| immortality?
| tim333 wrote:
| >Why We Need to Die
|
| >[because without death], we could defer everything indefinitely.
| Why start the difficult journey today when you have infinite
| tomorrows?
|
| is a pretty lame reason for everyone to die. Maybe the author is
| depressed and wants the threat of death to get stuff done but I
| like doing things.
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